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Tankitude!

16 February 2007 — dan

Why didn't someone tell me earlier that there was a show called Tank Overhaul?

(I found out about it in one of Toolmonger's TV updates.)

It's pretty much what you'd expect - one of those blokes-fixing-stuff-up shows, except with armoured fighting vehicles instead of some poxy motorcycle.

Sweat, rust and tea.

There are four episodes, featuring a Comet, a Panther, a Sherman and a Hellcat. I don't know whether there'll be any more (there's not a whole lot of info about the show on the Web; search for it and you're likely to find torrent sites before you find anything about the production company...), but there's quite a lot of tanky goodness in just these.

The series started out very well, with a collection of small-budget English blokes whose repair strategies involve a lot of sledgehammers, crowbars, wedges, and big baulks of wood. They love their jobs, and they make fun of millionaire tossers who hire other people to fix tanks for them at great expense.

Then along comes Episode 2, which is (a) quite heavily padded and (b) all about those millionaire tossers and the men who work for them.

(Curiously, it appears to be a rule on both sides of the Atlantic that no tank restoration workshop is complete without a black and white cat wandering around.)

Have at thee!

But episode three has the English chaps again. Hurrah!

Actually, all of the episodes have a non-trivial amount of somewhat repetitive padding, including the old Cheap-Ass War Documentary Maker's Favourite - shots of the place where a battle happened, with sound effects that give the impression that the fighting's still going on, if only the stupid cameraman would turn around. The producers are trying a bit harder than that, though; they also have sequences with pretty decent CGI tanks superimposed on the scene. I'd still rather the show spent all of its time with the actual restorers, though.

Rotato-tank!

The first three eps don't actually feature the end of the job, on account of how... the job doesn't end.

If your "restoration" only involves making the outside of a reasonably complete tank look presentable for static display in a museum, then you can get it done in a week. But these are proper restoration projects, with the aim of making a working and highly authentic vehicle. And, on top of that, they're not starting (in the first three episodes) with something that's been perfectly preserved in a bog. No; they get tanks that've either been sitting in a river for sixty years, or used for target practice for thirty.

You get to see a lot of progress, and other tanks trundling around and, upon occasion, deleting one spatial dimension from a smaller vehicle. But they kind of gloss over the fact that the actual project tanks in the first three episodes aren't even rolling chassis by the end of the show.

The last episode's got Americans again, but it's not as badly padded as the second, and goes all heartwarming at the end. Which is permissible, since you also get an M18 Hellcat tearing around like an 18-ton sports car.

This is almost enough to get me to forgive the voice-over guy for, earlier in the series, talking about how terrifying the German tank force was in 1941, over stock footage of ranks of Tiger IIs that didn't exist before 1944. And, more seriously, for using the term "military-industrial complex" as if it's a compliment, which it isn't.

Tank Overhaul is still excellent viewing, though.

Now - how can we get Tim and Rex involved?

(I've reviewed quite a lot of toy tanks over the years, by the way. Plus one centipede.)

Posted in Nerdery, Strange Tales, Toys. 5 Comments »

I'd drive it

10 February 2007 — dan

Also: Which Space Computer is your favourite?

(I think the inverted slope ones deserve their own entry. All good Space cockpits have at least one of those, either hanging from the hinged trans-yellow ceiling, or surrounding the intrepid spacedude or dudette, buried deep within his or her windowless, heavily armoured vehicle.)

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. 5 Comments »

The explosion, not the institute

1 February 2007 — dan

"CATO" can stand for a number of things, but in rocketry it means an explosion very, very early in the flight.

Opinions differ about whether it stands for "Catastrophe At Take-Off" or something else, but whatever the exact term is, everybody agrees that it involves lots of fuel burning much too early, for one reason or another.

CATOs are often very entertaining, for people who do not have to pay for them.

I remember watching an excellent documentary about Peenemünde that included quite a lot of period footage of V2 tests...

...though obviously not with a voice-over nearly as good as this.

On the subject of voice-overs - if you have the choice of using the word "catastrophe" or the word "anomaly" in a situation like this...

...the former is better.

(And how about that dubbing of the World's Oldest Explosion Sound over the real thing, huh? I bet that show was produced by the same people who do the "World's Most Severely Padded Police Videos" series.)

When big (unmanned) rockets blow up, it's got a kind of... corporate... feel to it. You're not personally connected to the action and feeling sorry for whoever's losing his job over it.

When amateur rocketry enters CATO land, though, there's more room for sympathy. Some individual person usually invested considerable time and money in that thing, and wh-BANG, there it all goes to nowhere.

For some reason, though, I find this one quite funny:

This one doesn't have the same comic timing, though:

One kind of rocket malfunction that can segue from CATO status into a general flight problem is the "blow-by", in which in which exhaust gases get out through the top of the motor as well as the bottom.

Which is bad.

Posted in Nerdery, Science, Strange Tales, Toys. 4 Comments »

Cook My Dinner, Wench: The Manly Game, For Men

29 January 2007 — dan

The other day, when idly browsing eBay, I found a listing for "POW! The Cannon Game For Boys".

I suddenly remembered it. That very game had been one of the stack we used to play when we went down the coast for the holidays.

(There was also a large pile of dog-eared 1960s comics, all of which I pored over at very great length. They included a colour reprint of the one that inspired a Mythbusters stunt.)

To be honest, we didn't actually play "POW!" very often, since it was a pretty dud game. It had little stand-up cardboard soldiers and marble-shooting spring cannons, which sound like a recipe for a diverting piece of entertainment. But the cannons had very little power, and the cardboard base was bouncy enough to make the whole exercise pretty random.

Still, y'know, it wasn't bad for 1964.

("POW!" certainly beat the heck out of the two-years-older "Squatter: The Australian Wool Game", which provided an intoxicating mix of incomprehensibility and tedium to hundreds of thousands of Australian children, possibly as a way of preparing them for the task of filling out income tax forms. If you need a lot of little plastic sheep-head tokens for some other game, though, "Squatter" can't be beat.)

The vintage also explained the "For Boys" thing. Sexism in toys is still very much alive, but I reckon the 60s was the last time it was actually made clear in big words on the box.

Until today, though, I had no idea that "POW!" had a sister game. Which was largely the same, but at the same time completely different.

I give you: "WOW! The Pillow Fight Game For Girls"!

Posted in Games, Humour, Toys. 5 Comments »

Squish

15 January 2007 — dan

Tank neat. Diorama neater.

Also: Here are some tentacles.

And, furthermore: The Tank-Pod!

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. 2 Comments »

Too Late For Christmas Gift Suggestions

22 December 2006 — dan

My gift-giving strategy, which works pretty well, is to maintain a "present pile" on which I put whatever nifty things I find whenever I find them. This is much less soul-destroyingly organised than Doing Your Christmas Shopping Early, but it can amount to the same thing - you just have to match gifts to people later on.

I buy a lot of products aimed at kids as presents, because you can give them to anybody. A good toy is, in my opinion, better than 90% of gifts meant for adults.

Accordingly, allow me to recommend Navir's line of toy optical devices.

Navir's flagship product, on display in overpriced-allegedly-educational-toy-stores the world over, is the Optic Wonder (that's it right there on their home page), different versions of which combine a folding opera-glass contraption with several other thingies.

The Optic Wonder does indeed work as binoculars and a microscope and all the other stuff they talk about, but its optical quality can't help but be pretty darn poor, since its lenses are unenclosed and ambient light can leak in all around. Light leaks are not a big deal for magnifiers, but they're very bad for telescopes; they give you a washed-out view, and can make it hard to see anything if there's a lot of ambient light hitting the lenses and not a lot coming from the target.

So I'd rather have more specialised toys, that're closer in design to the proper grown-up versions. And Navir have lots of those.

I bought a slightly used set of their Super 40 Red binoculars a while ago, and was impressed enough to get another new and shiny set to give away.

They're plain "Galilean" binoculars (Wikipedia has an excellent article explaining all this), with just a lens at each end, so they only manage 3.5X magnification. But they're solid and feel nice and work well and are, most importantly, cheap - $AU14 plus delivery, from this eBay seller, for the ones I bought.

The Super 40s are sized for a child's hands, but an adult can use them easily enough.

If your play scenarios run less to "intrepid explorer" and more to "battleship commander", the more imposing Super 60s may be in order. They've got a whole 4.5X magnification and 60mm objective lenses, which means that they may actually qualify as the world's cheapest astronomical binoculars, if they can manage half-decent sharpness. Low magnification and high light-gathering ability is, as I have explained in the past, exactly what you want from a basic astronomical instrument, because many interesting things in the sky are quite large, but very dim.

"Proper" binoculars have, for more than a century now, used prisms of one kind or another to allow wider spacing of the objective lenses (for a bit more stereo effect) and higher magnification (the prisms fold a longer optical path into the instrument without making it unmanageably bulky). But 3.5X magnification is actually quite enough for many viewing tasks, and it also means the image doesn't jump around annoyingly. And the image quality really is pretty good, too; certainly not excellent, but if you assume "toy binoculars" equals "useless binoculars", these cheapies will surprise you.

Cheap telescopes, in contrast, invariably have frankly lousy image quality. They don't have to, but they're forced into it by the fact that they've all got lots of magnification. That's because you just can't sell a cheap telescope that only says "10X" on the side. High magnification, unfortunately, also magnifies all of the problems with cheap lenses and tubes. Focus consistency (if it's sharp in the middle of the circle it'll be blurry on the edges), chromatic aberration (coloured fringes on everything), light leaks and internal reflections (because matte black light-tight tubing is more expensive than cheerfully coloured plastic). All perfectly tolerable at 3.5X, but awful at 30X.

That said, I like the Navir Explorer telescope. It cost me only another $AU14 plus delivery, and for that price it is a fine product. It's another basic Galilean design, with a not-too-stupid 15X magnification and the classic collapsible design that's essential for games of Horatio Hornblower Versus Blackbeard The Pirate.

You can pay a lot more than this for a Super Professional 50X Astronomical Very Good Telescope in a department store and get surprisingly little extra for your money. It's much harder to see things clearly through the Explorer than through the lower magnification binoculars, but at least you don't feel ripped off.

And then, there's this. It's the Looky periscope, and it does what you'd expect it to do. Collapsible tube, mirror at each end, siblings, for the spying on. It cost me only $AU10 plus delivery.

Navir have a couple of more impressive periscopes - one tank-ish version and one with magnification - but they're not nearly as sneaky as the little one-eyed Looky.

The Looky is the least educational Navir product I've bought, but it's also the one I most want to keep for myself.

Posted in Science, Toys. 2 Comments »

Light bulb diffraction

19 December 2006 — dan

$Diffraction glasses$

These fun glasses for kids contain low grade "starburst" diffraction gratings.

You can use them to examine the emission spectra of different light sources, which tells you about their colour rendering, which in turn helps you pick lights which give more natural output. Such lights are nicer to have around your home than lights with poor colour rendering, and they can also assist you in serious colour-critical tasks such as telling your jelly beans apart.

I've bought a few optically superior diffraction gratings from this eBay seller, and it's fun looking at lights through them and shining lasers through them and so on. The ones in the kiddy-specs are uncalibrated (measure the spacing yourself!) and a bit cloudier, but they're also big enough to cover both eyes, and they get the job done well enough.

$Halogen lamp diffraction$

"The job", defined.

The light in the above picture is a normal halogen downlight, so its diffraction spectrum is a smooth rainbow, like sunlight or a candle flame. Lights with a lower colour rendering index have different spectra, and diffraction glasses make that easy to see.

$Big CFL diffraction$

This is my giant compact fluorescent, which is alleged to have an eighty-plus CRI (where 100 is perfection), but which doesn't look that great to me. There's a smear of blue, probably indicating at least a bit of output colour range from the blue phosphor - perhaps a darker and a lighter blue on top of each other. But then there's quite distinct sub-images of the lamp in green and red, suggesting that it's got quite narrow output in those ranges.

But it sure is bright, as low-CRI lights tend to be; the classic "triphosphor" fluorescent lamp is still popular, because it's cheap and very high efficiency. It makes everybody look like corpses, but that's just the price you pay.

(I probably would have got a better shot of the big CFL from further away. It's so large that its sub-images overlap a lot at this distance.)

$Compact fluorescent diffraction$

A normal modern "warm white" compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), flanked by a half-burned-out LED lamp of no particular distinction.

You can see quite distinct violet, blue, green, orange and red diffraction images, each of which ought to correspond to a phosphor flavour. Generally speaking, the more phosphor colours, the better the CRI.

$Compact fluorescent diffraction$

Some good images from that lamp in close-up.

$Compact fluorescent diffraction$

A different CFL. I count four bright phosphors, plus two or three dimmer ones filling out the spectrum.

$Compact fluorescent diffraction$

Yet another CFL. Maybe only four phosphor colours in this one.

$LED lamp diffraction$

And, finally, another of those LED lamps, which really aren't a very interesting product - the only reason to use LED lamps for general lighting so far is if you want something that'll last 25 years, and these cheap Chinese lamps can't be counted on to last 25 days.

It's a nice spectrum, though. This is a normal "cool white" shade of white LED, created by putting a mixed phosphor layer over a naturally blue LED die. The result has quite good colour rendering.

I took all of these pictures with the little C6, by the way. It's got a physically small lens, which makes it good for taking pictures through other things, like these glasses, or telescopes, or whatever.

Posted in Electricity, Science, Toys. 1 Comment »